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Hosting  > Managed Servers 

Managed Server

Do your websites or other online applications generate considerable traffic and need to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? Then you should consider the benefits of having OpenAccess manage your production environment.

OpenAccess managed server solutions are almost always cost effective compared to purchasing, configuring and maintaining your servers in-house.

Its just plain old economics - economies of scale and comparative advantage.

We are already in the business of keeping a wide variety of systems up and running 24x7x365. Leverage our expertise - and keep your business (and your staff) focused on your business, not your servers.

OpenAccess offers managed server solutions to meet the tailored needs of individual customers.

Our managed server solutions generally come in three flavors:

  • 1 - We provide the hardware.
  • 2 - You provide the hardware and a vendor support contract.
  • 3 - You provide the hardware, with approval by OpenAccess.

Our emphasis is on systems management. Whether we provide the hardware, or you do, and whether it is a single machine or a fleet of servers dispersed across the globe, we will keep your applications secure and online 24x7.

Note, OpenAccess technical expertise is primarily Cisco, UNIX and Open Source / LAMP. We do operate for ourselves, and colocate for customers, Microsoft Wndows servers, but do not support Microsoft Windows as part of our managed server product line.

Option 1 - We Provide the Hardware
... the traditional approach.

The traditional approach to managed servers is in reality 'dedicated servers'. The servers are provided by the ISP and dedicated to your business needs.

When OpenAccess provides the physical hardware for a managed server solution we call this a dedicated server.

Often what a vendor calls a dedicated server is merely a 'slice' of a physical server, or a virtual server. Although not intuitive, a virtual server may be a better value for many customers, because of availibility and expandability.

OpenAccess defines a managed server as a single physical machine dedicated to a single customer and managed in the production environment by OpenAccess to provide a platform for the customer to effectively deploy applications.
Option 2 - You Provide Hardware...
...with vendor support

OpenAccess manages your servers housed in one or more secure data centers.

OpenAccess must be authorized on your vendor support contract so we can call them directly should we ever need to.

Option 3 - You Provide the Hardware...
...with our approval

This option is similar to the second with the exception of a full maintenance agreement with the hardware vendor.

This is a unique situation for deploying managed servers. You, the customer, can potentially leverage otherwise unused resources. OpenAccess, accepts the potential liabilities of keeping a machine, without vendor hardware support, alive and operational on the Internet.

Because of the potential liability we accept this contract option only upon our express approval of the particular machine(s) to be deployed. As noted in the description of this service, we will do it, but only upon approval, and approval is at our sole discretion. Minimum requirements are:
  • The machine meets the requirements for server colocation.
  • The machine is from a well known vendor such as Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Sun or SuperMicro. Home built machines are not allowed. We need to be able to reasonably expect to avoid and/or be able to repair equipment failures effectively, including accessing the manufacturer's website for documentation.
  • The machine was originally marketed and sold as a 'server grade' product by the well known vendor. This means at minimum it has redundant power supplies, hardware RAID (see below) and serial console redirection. Final determination of whether a particular machine is a server or not is made at the sole discretion of OpenAccess despite any claims made by manufacturers.
  • The machine has a hardware RAID disk subsystem capable of being SNMP monitorable as well as able to provide SNMP traps and/or e-mail notifications on events.

Whats New?
Read More...

2010.11.01 Digital telephone & PBX services expanded
Over the summer of 2010 OpenAccess has rolled out digital telephone service for ourselves, affiliated companies and a few customers who were willing to be 'guinea pigs'.  Overall things went better than we expected and we are now opening up our digital telephone service plans to more customers.
Read More...

2010.10.21 IPv6 Transition
OpenAccess will be having a mid range time line for adoption and implementation of IPv6.  As most people know who are reading this, there is a certain 'chicken & egg' problem with IPv6 in as much for any organization to move to IPv6 requires that other organizations have moved to IPv6.
Read More...

2010.07.15 NAS.COM wholesale VPS and WebHosting services
This fall, OpenAccess will be re-purposing the 'nas.com' domain name to provide VPS and WebHosting services, primarily wholesale to web developers. If you have an e-mail address @nas.com, or a personal website located at http://www.nas.com/~yourusername, those services will continue be supported although we will not be accepting new accounts.
Read More...

2010.02.22 Joomla auto install wizard now available.
Due to popular request, we now have a Joomla auto-installer available on our newer cPanel® servers.  This allows customers to quickly and easily install Joomla on their website.  The auto-installer is available under the 'site software' section in the administrative interface of your webhosting account.
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2009.10.25 OpenAccess begins internal testing for Windows 2008 Server hosting solutions.
OpenAccess is happy to finally be able to announce that we are beginning internal testing of cPanelŽ/Enkompass as a platform for our customers to be able to deliver Windows(c) 2008 Server solutions on.
Read More...

2007.09.26 Changes in paper billing system.
Effective January 1st 2008 we will be doing what most of our competitors have been doing for years and adding a $1.00 surcharge for paper invoices.
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2007.05.30 New web servers in production.
In May we got two new web servers in production. These machines are based out of our facilities in Seattle and were needed as we have about hit capacity on our existing webhosting infrastructure.
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2007.03.15 Additional nationwide and global network capacity added.
OpenAccess is glad to announce that we have put into production a new circuit providing us with direct Tier-1 nationwide and global Internet transport.
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2007.01.17 Verizon DSL speed upgrades complete
Today we did the work to convert all NAS.COM customers over to our faster connection into Verizon. Everybody should be seeing performance increases.
Read More...

More News...

(c) 1998-2012 OpenAccess Network Services
P.O. Box 4220, Bellingham, WA 98227
Bellingham/Whatcom (360) 647-0785 Toll Free: (800) 882-4979
e-mail: info@openaccess.org

OpenAccess is now part of the family.